Veloxum for VMware could help boost utilization while dropping your TCO.

As a workplace refrain, “do more with less” never goes out of style. What company, after all, doesn’t want to boost the productivity of its employees or the efficiency of its systems and processes? No one can argue against continuous improvement.

Kevin Cornell, CEO of Veloxum, a three-year-old performance management company, asks that enterprise IT professionals think about this as they study their virtual server infrastructures. “Whatever benefits you get from VMware can definitely be improved by increased performance,” he says.

Nobody is going to argue against that one, either – especially after looking at Veloxum statistics on performance improvement and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).

For example, server utilization at New York-based Maimonides Medical Center improved by 30% after the company deployed the Veloxum for VMware software, said Gabriel Sandu, senior director of technical services at Maimonides, in a prepared statement.

The software uses a technology Veloxum calls Active Continuous Optimization (ACO) – which Cornell equates functionally to network protocol analysis or, in more layman’s terms, tuning a car – to tune the virtualization infrastructure and application settings constantly. ACO works by collecting and analyzing many millions of periodic metrics from the virtual and physical infrastructure to determine what changes to memory, CPU, network and storage settings, for example, might increase utilization and improve performance, and then automatically applying these new configuration settings to the environment, the company describes.

At Maimonides, getting more out of its existing infrastructure resulted in a first-year savings of more than $120,000 on hardware as well as approximately $100,000 in ongoing operating expenses, Sandu reported.

Maimonides, which realized a return on investment on Veloxum in “only a few months,” now considers the software a standard part of its virtualization plans.

“We found that the constantly optimized environment ensured that the software did not run into resource issues, crashed less often, and provided a more responsive end-user experience. Veloxum allows me to keep both my users – doctors – and the CFO happy,” Sandu said.

Veloxum aims to address the pain point that manifested itself at Maimonides, which had been close to maxing out its virtualized infrastructure, Cornell says.

“Our optimum engagement is at a company that’s experiencing some level of performance issues that are either so bad that a product – say a CRM application – becomes unusable or are causing budget overruns – say because it’s not getting the guest-to-host density or the throughput it expected,” he says. “They’re trying to figure out why ‘more than enough’ on paper or at a project’s start translates into ‘not enough’ and ‘I need more now’ in the real world.”

Veloxum for VMware pricing, based on the number of operating systems under management, starts at $20,000.

With 2011 closing in, I’d love to hear what sorts of network and systems management advancements you’d like to see in the coming year. Share your wish list here.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can e-mail her or find her here.

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